Little Harbor in Normandy

A small Norman harbor and its boats are broken into a scaffold of faceted greens and browns, the masts, hulls, and shore reassembled into tilting planes. Georges Braque painted this just after his conversion from Fauvism, working in close dialogue with Picasso as the two forged Cubism together. Now in the Art Institute of Chicago, Little Harbor in Normandy shows the new language taking shape - the landscape analyzed into geometric volumes after the example of Cezanne, color subdued, the picture becoming a constructed scaffold of shifting form rather than a window onto a view.